On Wednesday 31 July 2024 at 21:11 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a education platform customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 296.2 million requests per second and lasted 184 minutes. Traffic originated from 587 autonomous systems in 54 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 296.2 million requests per second |
| Duration | 184 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.522 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.009% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.04% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 898 within 28 seconds. The risk score of participating clients crossed the challenge threshold automatically and proof-of-work difficulty rose with origin load.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.